13th century Maya codex, long shrouded in controversy, proves genuine PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] --The Grolier Codex, an ancient document that is among the rarest books in the world, has been regarded with skepticism since it was reportedly unearthed by looters from a cave in Chiapas, Mexico, in the 1960s. But a meticulous new study of the codex has yielded a startling conclusion: The codex is both genuine and likely the most ancient of all surviving manuscripts from ancient America. Stephen Houston, the Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and co-director of the Program in Early Cultures at Brown University, worked with Michael Coe, professor emeritus of archeology and anthropology at Harvard and leader of the research team, along with Mary Miller of Yale and Karl Taube of the University of California-Riverside. The paper, published in the journal Maya Archaeology, fills a special section of the publication and includes a lavish facsimile of the codex. Controversial from the outset Digging in Use and appearance of the Grolier Codex
Meet Jane, the 14-year-old eaten when the first British settlers in America turned to cannibalism: The macabre secrets of starving pioneers besieged by Red Indians Skull of a 14-year-old girl, named 'Jane of Jamestown', shows scratch marks Anthropologists from the Smith-sonian National Museum of Natural History analysed her skull and severed leg bones Dr Douglas Owsley said bones evidence of 'survival cannibalism' Human remains date back to the deadly winter of 1609-1610, known as the 'starving time' in Jamestown, when hundreds of colonists died By Annabel Venning for MailOnline Published: 22:35 GMT, 15 May 2013 | Updated: 22:35 GMT, 15 May 2013 She had arrived in America only a few months earlier. But any sense of salvation was to be short-lived. Food was already scarce when seven ships — including the one Jane travelled on — arrived with another 300 settlers to add to the 100 or so trying to eke out an existence in the swampy outpost. A facial reconstruction of 'Jane of Jamestown' who archeologists believe was dug up and eaten by settlers. Jane left the English south coast in June 1609 as part of the largest fleet yet to sail for Jamestown
We were all told they walked over a land bridge from Asia. Now that theory’s being called into question. You were probably told in school about how the first people reached North America over ten thousand years ago. The explanation most history or social studies teacher’s gave was that they crossed what is known as the Bering Strait Land Bridge (the Beringa) from Siberia to Alaska. This has been the prevailing theory since the 1930s. There is DNA evidence to support that people did in fact cross the Beringa and may even have lived on it for thousands of years, following herds and making their way little by little. They hunted large game such as mammoths and bison down into the North American continent, spreading out from there. But did the first Americans really come this way? A new study in the journal Nature gives striking evidence that casts it into doubt. The “Clovis First Model.” Radiocarbon dating puts the first human groups in North America as early as 15,000 years ago. But the only plant life on the Beringa were patches of grass. Clovis spear heads.
'Politics Ain’t the Same' — How the 19th Amendment Changed American Elections - BillMoyers.com A line of suffragists march with banners that read "Come to the White House Sunday at 3," in Washington DC in 1915. (Photo by Harris & Ewing/Buyenlarge/Getty Images) My mother was born in the United States of America without the right to vote. I just stopped to re-read that sentence because it seems so, you know, quaint. Okay, preposterous. By the time she neared voting age in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, prohibiting federal and state governments from denying citizens the right to vote “on account of sex.” Sheet music cover image of Oh! That’s my ritual, too (without the body armor), which is why this Friday, Aug. 26 — the 96th anniversary of the day American women got the vote — I’ll offer my annual thanks to the women and men who made it happen. Not to mention countless insults, inanities and hurled rotten eggs. But the result changed the dynamic, opening the electoral process to more individuals than ever before in American history. Yeah, well.
The Mohawks Who Built Manhattan (Photos) For generations, Mohawk Indians have left their reservations in or near Canada to raise skyscrapers in the heart of New York City. High atop a New York University building one bright September day, Mohawk ironworkers were just setting some steel when the head of the crew heard a big rumble to the north. Suddenly a jet roared overhead, barely 50 feet from the crane they were using to set the steel girders in place. “I looked up and I could see the rivets on the plane, I could read the serial numbers it was so low, and I thought ‘What is he doing going down Broadway?’” recalls the crew’s leader, Dick Oddo. Crew members watched in disbelief as the plane crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center, just 10 blocks away. At first, Oddo says, he thought it was pilot error. Like Oddo, most of the Mohawk crews working in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, headed immediately to the site of the disaster. Walking the iron Mohawks have been building skyscrapers for six generations.
‘Slam-dunk’ find puts hunter-gatherers in Florida 14,500 years ago Big game hunters of the Clovis culture may have just gotten the final blow to their reputation as North America’s earliest settlers. At least 1,000 years before Clovis people roamed the Great Plains, a group of hunter-gatherers either butchered a mastodon or scavenged its carcass on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Stone tools discovered in an underwater sinkhole in the Aucilla River show that people were present at the once-dry Page-Ladson site about 14,550 years ago, reports a team led by geoarchaeologists Jessi Halligan of Florida State University in Tallahassee and Michael Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station. Radiocarbon dating of twigs, seeds and plant fragments from submerged sediment layers provides a solid age estimate for six stone artifacts excavated by scuba divers, the team reports May 13 in Science Advances. DEEP FIND A diver surfaces from an excavation at Florida’s submerged Page-Ladson site holding a limb bone of a young mastodon. Brendan Fenerty
In Search of the Lost Empire of the Maya By Erik Vance Photographs by David Coventry This story appears in the September 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine. The ancient city of Holmul isn’t much to look at. Take a closer look, and you may notice that most of these hills are arranged in massive rings, like travelers huddled around a fire on a cold night. The site was a thriving settlement during the Classic Maya period (A.D. 250-900), a time when writing and culture flourished throughout what is today Central America and southern Mexico. Holmul isn’t a big, famous site like nearby Tikal, and it was mostly ignored by archaeologists until 2000, when Francisco Estrada-Belli arrived. Oddly, parts of the mural had been destroyed, apparently by the Maya themselves, as if they’d wanted to erase the history it depicted. In 2013 Estrada-Belli and his team worked their way into one of the larger pyramids, tracing an ancient staircase to the entrance of a ceremonial building. Stucco friezes are very rare and fragile.
The Rise and Not-Quite-Fall of Religion in American Politics by Derek Beres Religion and politics are old bedfellows generally—for millennia the two were indistinguishable. But to understand how we've arrived at where we are today, we need only travel back to the last great economic crash: the Great Depression. As Americans were trying to piece together any semblance of identity, and as Roosevelt initiated the sweeping reforms of the New Deal, a grumbling was heard emanating from conservative America. In America, the Right began embracing religion with capitalistic furor in the thirties, so argues Princeton history professor Kevin M Kruse. Corporate behemoths and manufacture lobbies, such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce, employed clergymen to promote conservative political values. Kruse continues, They saw Christianity and capitalism as inextricably intertwined and argued that the spreading of the gospel of one required spreading the gospel of the other. Until now. Image: Chip Somodevilia / Getty Images
The Little-Known History of the Forced Sterilization of Native American Women Two fifteen-year-old Native American women went into the hospital for tonsillectomies and came out with tubal ligations. Another Native American woman requested a “womb transplant,” only to reveal that she had been told that was an option after her uterus had been removed against her will. Cheyenne women had their Fallopian tubes severed, sometimes after being told that they could be “untied” again. For many, America’s history of brutal experimentation on people of color is perhaps best summed up by the Tuskegee Experiment, in which doctors let African-American men suffer from syphilis over a period of 40 years. But another medical outrage is less well-known. Jane Lawrence documents the forced sterilization of thousands of Native American women by the Indian Health Service in the 1960s and 1970s—procedures thought to have been performed on one out of every four Native American women at the time, against their knowledge or consent. The results are still felt within tribes today.